A case against achievements
Publication date: 12 April 2025 | Read time: 13 min | Listen time: 19 min
Click to listen to a fully human, non-AI reading of the article (length: 19:01)
One of the games I find myself returning to is Luck be a Landlord. If you haven't played it - in a nutshell, it's "bring your landlord to the guillotine with the power of your slot machine". The game's obviously very anti-capitalist, and surely, the guillotine makes an appearance as an item that automatically destroys all billionaires.
All items in the game have an essence - a "flip side", so to speak: An item that has a similar effect to its regular version, but more powerful - and requiring some esoteric conditions to be activated. The guillotine essence's description says just this:
If you have 1000000000 coins or more, you are destroyed.
In other words: should you become a billionaire, it's your turn at the chopping block. This has absolutely no use, other than to create an artificial end point for an endless run - provided you have this essence in the first place. To give you an idea of just how insane this number is: the final rent payment is 777 coins. To beat the final boss, you need 1500 coins on the highest difficulty. Should you manage that, you can enter endless mode, which - if you have a solid build - should allow you to eventually reach quite crazy numbers. But one billion?
So, you could say that this is a challenge run - there's even an achievement for having managed it. It's not even that rare: 12% of players have the achievement, which is more than the amount of players that beat the final floor of the game. And this is where things get interesting.
There's also an achievement for being guillotined twice. And thrice. And four, and five times. And ten. And twenty five. And fifty. And seventy seven.
And if that's not enough, the final achievement requires you to beat the game 777 times. For reference, I play the game rather casually, but always on the highest difficulty available to me - and in 30 something hours I managed to win 30 something times. Perhaps if I played to win, only on a difficulty which I could beat every time, this number would've been higher - but why would I adjust my preferred playstyle to get an arbitrary reward?
Okay, I'm not going to pretend I don't understand the completionist drive: the desire to 100%. The complete satiation. The perfect result. The closure that cannot be denied. Maybe even the thought of "If I can't achieve 100% completion, what's the point of even playing?". There was a point in my life where I was like this, and I remember thinking: "There's the simple path, for others; for the weak. And this is the path for me. The true path, the complete path".
I always thought that playing games in such a manner makes you some kind of elite minority - but nowadays it feels like this is actually a quite common mindset. Just a few days ago, I saw someone celebrating the start of the journey to "plat (100%) the Final Fantasy games, I-XVI". Not just beat, but to get everything that is there. Even beating all these games is quite a time investment (how do you beat XI and XIV that are MMOs, anyway?), what sort of time abyss would be required to get everything? I know for a fact that some achievements in FFXIV require truly inhuman levels of grinding, and that's just one game.
Now, before we go any further, let's just quickly ask: How did we get here? Why is this kind of thinking so prevalent? The best part to start is, as usual, at the beginning.
Let's be honest. Game design always pushed us towards completionism. Even as far back as Final Fantasy IV (1991), the dungeons were broadly designed as a path that would occasionally fork. One path would take you further towards the boss, the other(s) were dead ends. A very common design pattern even to this day.
But, aha, this creates a problem: Negative possibility space. Running into empty rooms is not fun. So the natural solution is to put some kind of treasure there - a consolation prize. "You picked the wrong path and now have to backtrack. But look: A shiny new sword!" And everybody's happy.
However, this in turn causes another problem. The shiny new sword will make the rest of the dungeon easier - and it might even be unique, impossible to get anywhere else. Tantalising. On top of that, since the player has to backtrack, they will naturally run into more random encounters - and get more experience, making them stronger. In other words, such design rewards taking "wrong" turns.
This is so prevalent that players often feel wrong if they end up choosing the correct path the first time around. It's even spilled to other media. In the anime Frieren: Beyond Journey's End, this exact mindset is being discussed, and presented as virtuous. And why wouldn't it be? You play more of the game. You become stronger. You explore more of what the designers created.
Or you waste more time, depending on your perspective.
Checking out every nook and cranny has been a thing for longer than that. Super Mario Bros. (1985) also rewards careful exploration - with warp zones. They allow you to skip large swaths of the game, in effect making you play less. Which is more rewarding, getting to play more of the game, or getting to the end quicker?
But let's not get into that here. Since games are almost always objective-driven, you'll usually have a list of things you haven't done yet. Quests you haven't completed, collectibles not found, optional objectives that provide extra rewards. What's in focus is not about what you've done, but what you haven't. For example, in Assasin's Creed 2 (2009) there's the infamous feather collection quest. You're literally expected to get to random places because there could be a feather there; and there are only two outcomes of this endavour. You either get them all, or you might not even bother. 99% is equivalent to 0%. There's 100 feathers, by the way.
I don't think I've met a single person who enjoyed this quest. So why did people bother at all? Okay, achievements, but also this is the only way to help the protagonist's mother return to sanity - something that has a noticeable emotional weight in the game. You want your mom back? Go climb that random balcony, there might be a feather there. Or you could use a guide, I guess.
Some games even go as far as have your 100% completion rate affect the ending. Hell, some lock the good ending behind 100% completion - and they're as recent as Neon White (2022)! And the most brutal example I can think of is Suikoden (1995); a character that's very dear to the protagonist (and, by proxy, the player), dies a slow, painful death while delivering an emotional speech. As it turns out, it's possible to bring the character back, and it's even needed for the best ending. You do it by recruiting all the other characters. Of which there are 108.
If you ask me, this isn't game design, this is a hostage situation. You will do this arduous thing because otherwise bad things will happen to the characters you've come to care about. But it doesn't matter; many, many players did end up going the distance. They've become accustomed to this.
Finally, the coup de grace that sealed this mindset as standard: Xbox brought Gamerscore (2005) and PlayStation Network brought the trophies (2008). Both with their numeric values; something to show off, to brag about, to compete about. At this point, for many players achievement hunting became what playing the game meant. And if you love the game, what better way to complete that love than to 100% it? Get everything there is?
For a change of pace, let me show you a few cases of how the people actually creating the games think. An interesting resource on this topic is Kyzrati (the developer of Cogmind)'s 2018 article about Cogmind's achievement design philosophy. I recommend giving it a read, but I'll quote a list of "reasons for adding (them)":
1. Record progress and skill milestones
2. Recognize special accomplishments
3. Create unique meta challenges
4. Teach players about the world or mechanics
5. Hint at some things possible in the game
6. Suggest alternative play styles
By their own admission, the developer has "never played a game with achievements", which might raise some eyebrows, but consider this: Cogmind has been in development since 2014 - and the game's apparent inspirations lie even further in the past, in the era of classic roguelikes (we're talking Berlin Interpretation), which didn't have achievements (at least back then. ADOM's current Steam release does have achievements, but that came out in 2015). Point being, Kyzrati's approach was largely unaffected by trends and community expectations.
This philosophy suggests Kyzrati saw achievements as interesting little pieces to play with; a challenge here, a thing to do there, an educational pointer elsewhere. They give a large selection of things to do, with the expectation that you'll choose those that interest you - completing all achievements is not something the developer seems to have treated seriously. There is an achievement for having all other achievements - and a grand total of 0.0% of players have it. That's probably because there's a whopping 256 of them to get, and they really are all over the place, or - unfortunately - the game turned out not up to par for many, as the progression achievement dropoff rate is quite rapid. I might even have contributed to that rate myself.
Still, Kyzrati definitely tried - doubly so when it came to achievements. I have reasons to believe that many developers put even less thought into achievements in general; they are seen as something to guide, or track progress, or just give some additional satisfaction to this or that. They are, broadly, somewhere between a curiosity and an afterthought. Literally: many of them were clearly added after the game was designed, and not much thought is put into the viability of getting them, and even less into how fun that would be.
In Miasmata, you'll find yourself stalked by the Creature: the game plays like a botanist/alchemist simulator of sorts, and then suddenly it becomes a horror game. Due to this mixture, it's insanely horrifying, even if the Creature is - upon closer inspection - not that scary, or even lethal. That's not the point. You'll find yourself running like you've never run before when you encounter it the first few times. And yet, the game contains achievements for throwing random objects at the Creature. An orange, an apple, a banana and a tin can, to be exact.
What does throwing random junk at a jungle horror have to do with anything? Why would you even think of doing this? Why is this achievement there, if not to express some kind of disdain at the concept of achievements itself?
I believe that game designers aren't very fond of achievements, or at least achievement hunting. You're expected to treat them as something you stumble upon, and be happy with your little find. Intentionality is removed from the equation; here are some examples.
Book of Hours has 95 achievements. Some of those are rewards for clearing (unlocking) rooms in the House, which is tenatively tied to the progression. There is an achievement for solving a major puzzle - finding and properly displaying all Librarian busts, in the correct order (a fun challenge, I might add). But the vast majority of these 95 are tied to "affairs" - quests, but not really. You do not have any control over which affairs you'll be presented with (to my knowledge, at least). And they aren't very common. Even in a long, deliberate playthrough, you're unlikely to encounter more than 20. Unless, of course, you prolong the game far, far beyond what makes sense, just to see them all. Or play the game multiple times (which, admittedly, the game seems to welcome and encourage).
Then, there are games where the achievements are cryptic. Their descriptions might be a puzzle; or they will only make sense once you've done it. Heaven's Vault gives us "A Change of Heart: Things will never be the same again..." or "A Voice from Stone: An ancient voice". This makes sense in context, but only a posteriori. In the same vein, Friends of Ringo Ishikawa has gems like "Cotton hunter: Do you have something against blondes?.." or "Gutta-percha: So that's what Masaru was talking about". I can't say whether they make sense in context or not, as I haven't stumbled upon any achievements whatsoever in my playthrough.
And then there's Wanderstop, where achievements are not only cryptic, you don't even seem to have much control over whether you get them or not. They just... happen, seemingly independently of your actions (with a few exceptions). This is very much in tune with the game's tone and messaging, so I suspect this is very deliberate.
You're not supposed to seek achievements. You're supposed to play the game. We design the game, not the achievements. - that's the statement I am hearing from this. Of course, you can just invoke Death of the Author and find ways around this philosophy... but, considering that games are carefully crafted experiences, that seems like a lot of effort to make yourself significantly less happy by transforming these experiences into something they were never meant to be.
Some games take things even further - they treat achievements as a punchline. Wandersong (not to be confused with Wanderstop) is a subversive game where you're explicitly not the Hero - you're a Bard who's so pacifist he refuses to walk on the ground with lots of bugs on it to avoid stepping on any. But there is a Hero. Nominally, at least.
In the short section where you play as said Hero, you find yourself suddenly bombarded with achievements such as "Defeat 15 bats!" or "Dash 5 times!". Note that before this moment, you probably only got one achievement - "Defeated the Troll" - which you explicitly didn't do; after this ridiculous display, you're back to playing the Bard - but there are still more achievements to get. And, sure enough, when the Hero accomplishes a feat, the player is awarded the achievement, but the way it's described and what actually happened aren't exactly in alignment. To avoid spoiling any more, let's just say that this is played for tragedy and drama.
Let's cleanse our palates by switching to Don't Starve. "Wait, I don't remember Don't Starve having achievements", you're probably thinking. And you'd be half-right, it doesn't - on Steam, that is. But Don't Starve also has a PS4 version, and Sony requires all games released in its ecosystem to have trophies. So, a simple solution: just add the damn achievements. Right?
That'd be the easy way out. Instead, Klei made a modification to the PS4 version: It has an extra building - the Accomploshrine. It requires very precious resources to build (6 gears, which aren't renewable in that version), its description says "Prove your worth as a human being.", its use is described as "A sense of accomplishment for those with nothing else to live for." - and, surely, you get an achievement for constructing it. You can also interact with the shrine - it doesn't do much, but you hear a cranking sound, and occasionally see fireworks. If you crank it 725 times, you get another achievement.
This is a clear message: Do not do this. This has nothing to do with the game, it's a huge waste of time and resources, and all you'll get for doing it is mockery. For your reading pleasure, let me note that 3.1% have the first achievement, 1.4% have the second. I wish I had the sales number for Don't Starve on PS4, so I could calculate just how many human beings pressed a pointless crank button 725 times, just to receive this achievement.
Finally, let me bring up Undertale. Its core text is about non-violent solutions, but you're also presented with an opportunity to completely ignore this message. Should you do so, the game you'll end up playing will be a completely different one; but what's relevant here is the final fight of this route.
The character you'll be facing is not just a boss: they try their hardest not to just defeat the player character, but to prevent the player from progressing. The fight is insanely difficult, the boss breaks some established rules of the game and even uses some edge cases of the design itself to discourage you from continuing; they also talk to you. Trying to convince you to STOP.
I know your type. You're very determined, aren't you? You'll never give up, even if there's absolutely NO benefit to perservering whatsoever. (...) Not out of any desire for good or evil... But just because you think you can. And because you "can"... You "have to."
Incidentally, Undertale's Steam edition has no achievements. The PSN version's forced achievements are either silly (such as "Get four items") or tied to an otherwise pointless hidden donation shrine. There are no achievements related to endings or routes. And yet, there's a little more to this story.
The PSN version came out almost 2 years after the Steam version - and there was a time when people were speculating what sort of Trophies would there be. This 2017 thread from playstationtrophies.org forums is one such speculation, and people's ideas are pretty much what you'd expect. Of course, all of the lists include winning the fight I just mentioned, but there's one post in particular I'd like to quote:
If there's one trophy I want, it's: Defeating (boss name). As much as I hate doing the genocide run, (boss name) is the entire reason for playing that route. (They're) not that hard once you get used to (their) pattern as well as that kick ass (...) music. (...)
This, I feel, is one of these moments where two parties talk to each other, but the listener understands something completely different from what the speaker intended. Toby Fox (Undertale's developer)'s message is "Some paths aren't meant to be walked. Do not complete this. I know you feel compelled to, but you're only hurting your experience like this." I can say this with some degree of confidence because other elements of the game's text say similar things.
What some gamers hear instead is "Ha! Look at this super hidden challenge. You had to go through so much to get here. It's so hard! It even manipulates you into thinking you shouldn't do it! You're not gonna let the game win, are you?"
I don't think I'm going to shock anyone by saying that different people want different things; tastes always will differ from one another, and that's wonderful - artistic diversity ensures that the art (in this case, gamedev) community remains ever vibrant. But this, I'd argue, goes beyond simple matters of taste. It's a fundamental mismatch of expectations of what a game is even supposed to be.
This topic is, I'm afraid, too large for a single article - and it spreads far further than just a disagreement about achievements. Nevertheless, it's a topic I find interesting, and I don't see much discourse around it (that doesn't involve insults or even death threats); might as well start it myself. Here are some general directions of research I'm pursuing towards shedding some light on the topic:
- An analysis of the reasons why game developers think the way they do
- A closer look at the gaming community, with special attention being given to achievement-minded gamers
- A showcase of games where developer intent and player expectations when it comes to goals are in relative alignment
Each of these topics warrants its own article. I tried to cram them together, but let's just say that the resulting text didn't have much thematic cohesion, and was generally awful to read (and write). So, to save my sanity - and yours, dear reader - this is the solution I've come up with.
I can't say I'm happy with ending my first article on such a cliffhanger, without any meaningful resolution, but honestly, when I set out to write it, I had no idea just how many moving parts I'd have to touch to present my case well. I can only hope that I've managed to convince you that this is a topic worthy of an ounce of your attention.
All items in the game have an essence - a "flip side", so to speak: An item that has a similar effect to its regular version, but more powerful - and requiring some esoteric conditions to be activated. The guillotine essence's description says just this:
If you have 1000000000 coins or more, you are destroyed.
In other words: should you become a billionaire, it's your turn at the chopping block. This has absolutely no use, other than to create an artificial end point for an endless run - provided you have this essence in the first place. To give you an idea of just how insane this number is: the final rent payment is 777 coins. To beat the final boss, you need 1500 coins on the highest difficulty. Should you manage that, you can enter endless mode, which - if you have a solid build - should allow you to eventually reach quite crazy numbers. But one billion?
So, you could say that this is a challenge run - there's even an achievement for having managed it. It's not even that rare: 12% of players have the achievement, which is more than the amount of players that beat the final floor of the game. And this is where things get interesting.
There's also an achievement for being guillotined twice. And thrice. And four, and five times. And ten. And twenty five. And fifty. And seventy seven.
And if that's not enough, the final achievement requires you to beat the game 777 times. For reference, I play the game rather casually, but always on the highest difficulty available to me - and in 30 something hours I managed to win 30 something times. Perhaps if I played to win, only on a difficulty which I could beat every time, this number would've been higher - but why would I adjust my preferred playstyle to get an arbitrary reward?
Okay, I'm not going to pretend I don't understand the completionist drive: the desire to 100%. The complete satiation. The perfect result. The closure that cannot be denied. Maybe even the thought of "If I can't achieve 100% completion, what's the point of even playing?". There was a point in my life where I was like this, and I remember thinking: "There's the simple path, for others; for the weak. And this is the path for me. The true path, the complete path".
I always thought that playing games in such a manner makes you some kind of elite minority - but nowadays it feels like this is actually a quite common mindset. Just a few days ago, I saw someone celebrating the start of the journey to "plat (100%) the Final Fantasy games, I-XVI". Not just beat, but to get everything that is there. Even beating all these games is quite a time investment (how do you beat XI and XIV that are MMOs, anyway?), what sort of time abyss would be required to get everything? I know for a fact that some achievements in FFXIV require truly inhuman levels of grinding, and that's just one game.
Now, before we go any further, let's just quickly ask: How did we get here? Why is this kind of thinking so prevalent? The best part to start is, as usual, at the beginning.
Let's be honest. Game design always pushed us towards completionism. Even as far back as Final Fantasy IV (1991), the dungeons were broadly designed as a path that would occasionally fork. One path would take you further towards the boss, the other(s) were dead ends. A very common design pattern even to this day.
But, aha, this creates a problem: Negative possibility space. Running into empty rooms is not fun. So the natural solution is to put some kind of treasure there - a consolation prize. "You picked the wrong path and now have to backtrack. But look: A shiny new sword!" And everybody's happy.
However, this in turn causes another problem. The shiny new sword will make the rest of the dungeon easier - and it might even be unique, impossible to get anywhere else. Tantalising. On top of that, since the player has to backtrack, they will naturally run into more random encounters - and get more experience, making them stronger. In other words, such design rewards taking "wrong" turns.
This is so prevalent that players often feel wrong if they end up choosing the correct path the first time around. It's even spilled to other media. In the anime Frieren: Beyond Journey's End, this exact mindset is being discussed, and presented as virtuous. And why wouldn't it be? You play more of the game. You become stronger. You explore more of what the designers created.
Or you waste more time, depending on your perspective.
Checking out every nook and cranny has been a thing for longer than that. Super Mario Bros. (1985) also rewards careful exploration - with warp zones. They allow you to skip large swaths of the game, in effect making you play less. Which is more rewarding, getting to play more of the game, or getting to the end quicker?
But let's not get into that here. Since games are almost always objective-driven, you'll usually have a list of things you haven't done yet. Quests you haven't completed, collectibles not found, optional objectives that provide extra rewards. What's in focus is not about what you've done, but what you haven't. For example, in Assasin's Creed 2 (2009) there's the infamous feather collection quest. You're literally expected to get to random places because there could be a feather there; and there are only two outcomes of this endavour. You either get them all, or you might not even bother. 99% is equivalent to 0%. There's 100 feathers, by the way.
I don't think I've met a single person who enjoyed this quest. So why did people bother at all? Okay, achievements, but also this is the only way to help the protagonist's mother return to sanity - something that has a noticeable emotional weight in the game. You want your mom back? Go climb that random balcony, there might be a feather there. Or you could use a guide, I guess.
Some games even go as far as have your 100% completion rate affect the ending. Hell, some lock the good ending behind 100% completion - and they're as recent as Neon White (2022)! And the most brutal example I can think of is Suikoden (1995); a character that's very dear to the protagonist (and, by proxy, the player), dies a slow, painful death while delivering an emotional speech. As it turns out, it's possible to bring the character back, and it's even needed for the best ending. You do it by recruiting all the other characters. Of which there are 108.
If you ask me, this isn't game design, this is a hostage situation. You will do this arduous thing because otherwise bad things will happen to the characters you've come to care about. But it doesn't matter; many, many players did end up going the distance. They've become accustomed to this.
Finally, the coup de grace that sealed this mindset as standard: Xbox brought Gamerscore (2005) and PlayStation Network brought the trophies (2008). Both with their numeric values; something to show off, to brag about, to compete about. At this point, for many players achievement hunting became what playing the game meant. And if you love the game, what better way to complete that love than to 100% it? Get everything there is?
For a change of pace, let me show you a few cases of how the people actually creating the games think. An interesting resource on this topic is Kyzrati (the developer of Cogmind)'s 2018 article about Cogmind's achievement design philosophy. I recommend giving it a read, but I'll quote a list of "reasons for adding (them)":
1. Record progress and skill milestones
2. Recognize special accomplishments
3. Create unique meta challenges
4. Teach players about the world or mechanics
5. Hint at some things possible in the game
6. Suggest alternative play styles
By their own admission, the developer has "never played a game with achievements", which might raise some eyebrows, but consider this: Cogmind has been in development since 2014 - and the game's apparent inspirations lie even further in the past, in the era of classic roguelikes (we're talking Berlin Interpretation), which didn't have achievements (at least back then. ADOM's current Steam release does have achievements, but that came out in 2015). Point being, Kyzrati's approach was largely unaffected by trends and community expectations.
This philosophy suggests Kyzrati saw achievements as interesting little pieces to play with; a challenge here, a thing to do there, an educational pointer elsewhere. They give a large selection of things to do, with the expectation that you'll choose those that interest you - completing all achievements is not something the developer seems to have treated seriously. There is an achievement for having all other achievements - and a grand total of 0.0% of players have it. That's probably because there's a whopping 256 of them to get, and they really are all over the place, or - unfortunately - the game turned out not up to par for many, as the progression achievement dropoff rate is quite rapid. I might even have contributed to that rate myself.
Still, Kyzrati definitely tried - doubly so when it came to achievements. I have reasons to believe that many developers put even less thought into achievements in general; they are seen as something to guide, or track progress, or just give some additional satisfaction to this or that. They are, broadly, somewhere between a curiosity and an afterthought. Literally: many of them were clearly added after the game was designed, and not much thought is put into the viability of getting them, and even less into how fun that would be.
In Miasmata, you'll find yourself stalked by the Creature: the game plays like a botanist/alchemist simulator of sorts, and then suddenly it becomes a horror game. Due to this mixture, it's insanely horrifying, even if the Creature is - upon closer inspection - not that scary, or even lethal. That's not the point. You'll find yourself running like you've never run before when you encounter it the first few times. And yet, the game contains achievements for throwing random objects at the Creature. An orange, an apple, a banana and a tin can, to be exact.
What does throwing random junk at a jungle horror have to do with anything? Why would you even think of doing this? Why is this achievement there, if not to express some kind of disdain at the concept of achievements itself?
I believe that game designers aren't very fond of achievements, or at least achievement hunting. You're expected to treat them as something you stumble upon, and be happy with your little find. Intentionality is removed from the equation; here are some examples.
Book of Hours has 95 achievements. Some of those are rewards for clearing (unlocking) rooms in the House, which is tenatively tied to the progression. There is an achievement for solving a major puzzle - finding and properly displaying all Librarian busts, in the correct order (a fun challenge, I might add). But the vast majority of these 95 are tied to "affairs" - quests, but not really. You do not have any control over which affairs you'll be presented with (to my knowledge, at least). And they aren't very common. Even in a long, deliberate playthrough, you're unlikely to encounter more than 20. Unless, of course, you prolong the game far, far beyond what makes sense, just to see them all. Or play the game multiple times (which, admittedly, the game seems to welcome and encourage).
Then, there are games where the achievements are cryptic. Their descriptions might be a puzzle; or they will only make sense once you've done it. Heaven's Vault gives us "A Change of Heart: Things will never be the same again..." or "A Voice from Stone: An ancient voice". This makes sense in context, but only a posteriori. In the same vein, Friends of Ringo Ishikawa has gems like "Cotton hunter: Do you have something against blondes?.." or "Gutta-percha: So that's what Masaru was talking about". I can't say whether they make sense in context or not, as I haven't stumbled upon any achievements whatsoever in my playthrough.
And then there's Wanderstop, where achievements are not only cryptic, you don't even seem to have much control over whether you get them or not. They just... happen, seemingly independently of your actions (with a few exceptions). This is very much in tune with the game's tone and messaging, so I suspect this is very deliberate.
You're not supposed to seek achievements. You're supposed to play the game. We design the game, not the achievements. - that's the statement I am hearing from this. Of course, you can just invoke Death of the Author and find ways around this philosophy... but, considering that games are carefully crafted experiences, that seems like a lot of effort to make yourself significantly less happy by transforming these experiences into something they were never meant to be.
Some games take things even further - they treat achievements as a punchline. Wandersong (not to be confused with Wanderstop) is a subversive game where you're explicitly not the Hero - you're a Bard who's so pacifist he refuses to walk on the ground with lots of bugs on it to avoid stepping on any. But there is a Hero. Nominally, at least.
In the short section where you play as said Hero, you find yourself suddenly bombarded with achievements such as "Defeat 15 bats!" or "Dash 5 times!". Note that before this moment, you probably only got one achievement - "Defeated the Troll" - which you explicitly didn't do; after this ridiculous display, you're back to playing the Bard - but there are still more achievements to get. And, sure enough, when the Hero accomplishes a feat, the player is awarded the achievement, but the way it's described and what actually happened aren't exactly in alignment. To avoid spoiling any more, let's just say that this is played for tragedy and drama.
Let's cleanse our palates by switching to Don't Starve. "Wait, I don't remember Don't Starve having achievements", you're probably thinking. And you'd be half-right, it doesn't - on Steam, that is. But Don't Starve also has a PS4 version, and Sony requires all games released in its ecosystem to have trophies. So, a simple solution: just add the damn achievements. Right?
That'd be the easy way out. Instead, Klei made a modification to the PS4 version: It has an extra building - the Accomploshrine. It requires very precious resources to build (6 gears, which aren't renewable in that version), its description says "Prove your worth as a human being.", its use is described as "A sense of accomplishment for those with nothing else to live for." - and, surely, you get an achievement for constructing it. You can also interact with the shrine - it doesn't do much, but you hear a cranking sound, and occasionally see fireworks. If you crank it 725 times, you get another achievement.
This is a clear message: Do not do this. This has nothing to do with the game, it's a huge waste of time and resources, and all you'll get for doing it is mockery. For your reading pleasure, let me note that 3.1% have the first achievement, 1.4% have the second. I wish I had the sales number for Don't Starve on PS4, so I could calculate just how many human beings pressed a pointless crank button 725 times, just to receive this achievement.
Finally, let me bring up Undertale. Its core text is about non-violent solutions, but you're also presented with an opportunity to completely ignore this message. Should you do so, the game you'll end up playing will be a completely different one; but what's relevant here is the final fight of this route.
The character you'll be facing is not just a boss: they try their hardest not to just defeat the player character, but to prevent the player from progressing. The fight is insanely difficult, the boss breaks some established rules of the game and even uses some edge cases of the design itself to discourage you from continuing; they also talk to you. Trying to convince you to STOP.
I know your type. You're very determined, aren't you? You'll never give up, even if there's absolutely NO benefit to perservering whatsoever. (...) Not out of any desire for good or evil... But just because you think you can. And because you "can"... You "have to."
Incidentally, Undertale's Steam edition has no achievements. The PSN version's forced achievements are either silly (such as "Get four items") or tied to an otherwise pointless hidden donation shrine. There are no achievements related to endings or routes. And yet, there's a little more to this story.
The PSN version came out almost 2 years after the Steam version - and there was a time when people were speculating what sort of Trophies would there be. This 2017 thread from playstationtrophies.org forums is one such speculation, and people's ideas are pretty much what you'd expect. Of course, all of the lists include winning the fight I just mentioned, but there's one post in particular I'd like to quote:
If there's one trophy I want, it's: Defeating (boss name). As much as I hate doing the genocide run, (boss name) is the entire reason for playing that route. (They're) not that hard once you get used to (their) pattern as well as that kick ass (...) music. (...)
This, I feel, is one of these moments where two parties talk to each other, but the listener understands something completely different from what the speaker intended. Toby Fox (Undertale's developer)'s message is "Some paths aren't meant to be walked. Do not complete this. I know you feel compelled to, but you're only hurting your experience like this." I can say this with some degree of confidence because other elements of the game's text say similar things.
What some gamers hear instead is "Ha! Look at this super hidden challenge. You had to go through so much to get here. It's so hard! It even manipulates you into thinking you shouldn't do it! You're not gonna let the game win, are you?"
I don't think I'm going to shock anyone by saying that different people want different things; tastes always will differ from one another, and that's wonderful - artistic diversity ensures that the art (in this case, gamedev) community remains ever vibrant. But this, I'd argue, goes beyond simple matters of taste. It's a fundamental mismatch of expectations of what a game is even supposed to be.
This topic is, I'm afraid, too large for a single article - and it spreads far further than just a disagreement about achievements. Nevertheless, it's a topic I find interesting, and I don't see much discourse around it (that doesn't involve insults or even death threats); might as well start it myself. Here are some general directions of research I'm pursuing towards shedding some light on the topic:
- An analysis of the reasons why game developers think the way they do
- A closer look at the gaming community, with special attention being given to achievement-minded gamers
- A showcase of games where developer intent and player expectations when it comes to goals are in relative alignment
Each of these topics warrants its own article. I tried to cram them together, but let's just say that the resulting text didn't have much thematic cohesion, and was generally awful to read (and write). So, to save my sanity - and yours, dear reader - this is the solution I've come up with.
I can't say I'm happy with ending my first article on such a cliffhanger, without any meaningful resolution, but honestly, when I set out to write it, I had no idea just how many moving parts I'd have to touch to present my case well. I can only hope that I've managed to convince you that this is a topic worthy of an ounce of your attention.